People stop caring whether something is good or not when there's so much of everything now. Why spend time evaluating when you can just move on to the next thing? That's not really an AI problem, but AI has definitely made it worse.
Slop is not necessarily the future
341–350 of 512 posts
Re: Slop is not necessarily the future
#342Re: Slop is not necessarily the future
#343I wish it was true, but it sounds like copium. I bet garment makers, or artisan woodworkers said the same when big store cheap retails came. I bet they said "people value quality and etc", but in the end, outside of a group of people who has principles, everyone else floods their home with H&Ms and crap from Temu. So yeah, good code might win among small group of principled people, but the majority will not care. And…
Artisanal crafts are alive and well. It turns out that some people actually prefer handmade stuff to the mass-produced kind, and there's plenty enough of them for a viable market, at least for the highest-quality producers. The real losers are those who make stuff of only barely-acceptable quality: they have no edge over what's mass produced, their middling skills lose value and they're forced to exit the sector.
That is ture, but the revenue of the artisanal stuff is probably only a very low percentage of the overall market, which would imply a lot of software engineers would have to exit the field. Which is what we here don't want to see.
Re: Slop is not necessarily the future
#344Earlier quoted context omitted.
That example doesn't work well. All regulations come at the cost of freedom, and every freedom comes at the cost of regulations. While it isn't a strict binary (either 100% freedom or 100% regulation), enacting regulations do interfere with freedom. So this isn't just framing, it demonstrates a relationship between the two concepts, which may become relevant down in the discussion, if it already hasn't.
Regulation can cause freedom to be balanced differently between parties. For example, regulating smartphone manufacturers can result in more freedom for users. It’s not true that regulation necessarily reduces freedom overall (to the extent that that can even be graded). Just like rights, freedoms aren’t absolute, and one’s freedom often impinges on someone else’s freedom.
The increase of freedom of the users is an indirect side effect, intentional or not, which, as you put it, can happen, or not. But a direct effect, which is guaranteed to happen, is the loss of freedom of the manufacturer. Whether that's a good thing, that's another topic.
Re: Slop is not necessarily the future
#345What I would like to add is that coding in the flow state is underestimated. When your brain just clicks with every change and variable it's just different AND more efficient than doing with AI.
Coding in the flow state has always been appreciated, it's just been surpassed by a new technology.
Your brain can still "just click" with agentic coding. But it will have to be at a higher level of abstraction. Perhaps the "click" feels different, and will take some adjusting to.
Re: Slop is not necessarily the future
#346Meanwhile, the complexity of the average piece of software is drastically increasing. ... The stats suggest that devs are shipping more code with coding agents. The consequences may already be visible: analysis of vendor status pages [3] shows outages have steadily increased since 2022, suggesting software is becoming more brittle. We've already seen a large-scale AWS outage because of this. It could get much worse.…
Even the prompt history is notoriously weak given how little Claude Code and some of the others display to give developers confidence in the process.
There needs to me more design rep indeed.
Re: Slop is not necessarily the future
#347I find most developers fall into one of two camps: 1. You treat your code as a means to an end to make a product for a user. 2. You treat the code itself as your craft, with the product being a vector for your craft. The people who typically have the most negative things to say about AI fall into camp #2 where AI is automating a large part of what they considered their art while enabling people in group #1 to iterate…
I fall into camp 2 but I’m different. I cannot delude myself away from reality. What you will find is that people in camp 2 are lying to them selves. They are denying an impending reality where ai slop becomes even better than the code they write themselves.
Also it’s more than an art or a craft. It’s identity. Many people hold their coding skill as an identity they honed it over many years and it put them in the ranking they are in today. This kind of destruction of identity by AI is what causes people to deny reality.
This stuff also covers your job, even if you don’t hold coding as an identity it is still responsible for many people’s livelihoods. Like ai is convenient right now but what happens when it gets even more convenient? What happens to your job and your life especially if software was all you did for over a decade?
I’m in camp 2 and I can’t lie to myself about what’s happening. I’ve embraced ai and I now vibe code daily even though I was originally an artistic functional programmer. This ability comes at high cost. I’m able to do it because I hold zero identity. I dont identity with anything and I don’t put too much pride into anything I do or at least if I put pride into something I’m always conscious of severing the entire thing at a moments notice.
Lying to oneself is a powerful ability but it becomes a liability when society goes through an intense paradigm shift. This is what is happening now.
Re: Slop is not necessarily the future
#348Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you even converge on the right data model without refining code? Elegant code and elegant data model are the exact same thing!
It's called "systems analysis". Programmers are generally pretty terrible at it because it requires holistic, big-picture thinking. But it used to take up the bulk of the design activity for a new enterprise system.
And the result was usually a complex system that no one needed and could maintain. Successful refinement is needed when you try to accomplish something from the ground up, refining it as you're adding features. Not locking yourself in the ivory tower drawing UML diagrams and drafting requirements. Doing and thinking go in pair, not separately.
Re: Slop is not necessarily the future
#349Why build each new airplane with the care and precision of a Rolls-Royce? In the early 1970s, Kelly Johnson and I [Ben Rich] had dinner in Los Angeles with the great Soviet aerodynamicist Alexander Tupolev, designer of their backfire Bear bomber. 'You Americans build airplanes like a Rolex watch,' he told us. 'Knock it off the night table and it stops ticking. We build airplanes like a cheap alarm clock. But knock it…
Soviet engineering wasn't sloppy. It was designed for robustness, loose tolerances and simplicity. It was well thought out design. In the same way that as much thought went into the cheap alarm clock than went into the Rolex watch, maybe even more so, the engineers just had different requirements.
It takes a lot of work to make cheap, low precision parts work together reliably. The Rolex has it easy, all the parts are precisely built at a great cost and everything fits perfectly. With the cheap alarm clock, you don't know what you will get, so you have to account for every possible defect, because you won't get anything better with your budget and the clock still needs to give you an idea about what time it is.
The parallel in software would be defensive programming, fault tolerance, etc... Ironically, that's common practices in critical software, and it is the most expensive kind of software to develop, the opposite of slop.
Re: Slop is not necessarily the future
#350The camps framing misses something. After 15 years writing code I've found the
people who ship the best products understand both sides. You need to care about
craft enough to know when AI output is garbage, and you need to care about
shipping enough to not gold-plate things that don't matter.
The slop problem isn't AI, it's people who can't tell the difference between good and bad output because they never developed the craft in the first place. AI just makes that gap more visible.